Was the US behind the single
greatest act of ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia?

By Stephen Gowans

It was one of those peeks into what really happened that are occasionally
glimpsed long after anyone cares, like finding out after the invasion of
Iraq that the US and Britain had already begun aerial operations to pick
apart Iraq's defenses long before the invasion had begun, at a time both
countries were denying they had already made a decision to go to war ("U.S.
Moved Early for Air Supremacy: Airstrips on Iraqi Defenses Began Long Before
Invasion, General Says," The Washington Post, July 20, 2003). Those who
saw the news reports may have raised their eyebrows, but the reports were
too obscure to have flitted, even briefly, across the consciousness of
most (even ardent) newspaper readers. The secret, though technically out,
remained a secret, lost in the deluge of other news, bereft of any urgency
for being about an event that had happened months before.

So who's going to care about something that happened almost eight years
ago?

"In early August 1995," writes researcher Gregory Elich, "the Croatian
invasion of Serbian Krajina precipitated the worst refugee crisis of the
Yugoslav civil war. Within days, more than two hundred thousand Serbs,
virtually the entire population of Krajina, fled their homes, and 14,000
Serbian civilians lost their lives." ("The invasion of Serbian Krajina,"
NATO in the Balkans: Voices of Opposition, International Action Center,
New York, 1998.)

This was Operation Storm, "the largest single act of ethnic cleansing
of the Yugoslav civil war," according to Even Dyer, a journalist with CBC
Radio. "And yet not one person has been arrested and brought before the
International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia" ("Croatian atrocities
being forgotten: Cdn. Officers," CBC News, July 21, 2003.)

The popular mythology about the Yugoslav civil war is that it was the
Serbs, led by Slobodan Milosevic, who embarked on a program of ethnic cleansing
to create a greater Serbia. Milosevic is on trial at the Hague Tribunal,
facing genocide charges.

So it should strike a dissonant chord that:

the single greatest act of ethnic cleansing does not have the Serb's signature
on it (they were the victims); and

the Hague Tribunal, which professes to be impartial, has done nothing to
bring the authors of the atrocity to book.

The Tribunal says the evidence is circumstantial, but senior Canadian soldiers,
including
a general who commanded peacekeeping forces in the area of Operation
Storm, say they suspect the real reason for the Tribunal's inaction is
that Western governments were in the background pulling the strings.

For example, Argentina provided artillery to the Croats, despite a UN
embargo on supplying materiel and even though their own troops were in
Croatia as peacekeepers.

And a private US military contractor, Military Professional Resources
Inc (MPRI), headed by a former US Army Chief of Staff, likely planned the
operation.

Canada's Major-General Andrew Leslie says he doubts the Croats could
have pulled off Operation Storm themselves. "That was done by people who
really knew what they were doing."

Leslie's colleague, Major-General Alain Fourand, agrees. He says he
suspects it was MPRI that was behind the operation.

The MPRI Web site, according to CBC news, "points to an article in which
the Croatian government praised the job MPRI has done for it."

There is much that is misunderstood about the Yugoslav civil war, and
the Hague Tribunal.

For one, the Croats were a lot closer to the image of Nazis than the
Serbs were, though it was Serbs who were portrayed, for propaganda reasons,
as successors of Hitler's fascists. After the breakaway Croat republic
violently seceded from Yugoslavia in 1991, Franjo Tudjman, the country's
president, began to resurrect symbols of Croatia's Nazi puppet state past.
According to Elich, "the Croatian fascist(s) murdered as many as one million
Serbs, Jews and Romani" during WWII.

And the Tribunal is funded in part by billionaire financier George Soros,
who has a long history of underwriting programs to destabilize countries
whose markets are closed, or partly closed, to Western investment. Once
a renitent government is ousted, and a Western friendly regime is installed,
Soros swoops in to buy up state assets at fire sale prices. Soros is said
to have his eyes on the massive Trepca mining complex in Kosovo, worth
an estimated $5 billion. The Hungarian émigré spent $100
million to oust Milosevic, who presided over a largely socially owned economy
("The billionaire trader has become Eastern Europe's uncrowned king and
the prophet of an 'open society." But open to what?" New Statesman, June
2, 2003.)

The US and Germany began supporting secessionist forces in Yugoslavia
after the collapse of Communism in the former Soviet Union, when the Yugoslav
federation refused to be brought wholly into the Western orbit. Former
Communist countries were undergoing a spate of privatization. But, according
to Neil Clark, "Over 700,000 Yugoslav enterprises remained in social ownership
and most were still controlled by employee-management committees, with
only 5% of capital privately owned." ("The quisling of Belgrade," The Guardian
(UK), March 14, 2003.) The West aligned itself with Alija Izetbegovic in
Bosnia, who wanted to makeover the multi-ethnic republic as an Islamic
religious state, though Bosnia had a large non-Muslim, including Serb,
population. And Tudjman, the West's favorite in Croatia, reeked to heaven
of fascism and anti-Serb fanaticism. But both were useful as instruments
to tear apart the federation and deliver it, piece by piece, into the hands
of the West, and its corporate sector.

Later, secessionist in Kosovo would be encouraged, trained, and bankrolled
by the West, sparking a civil war that furnished NATO with a pretext to
launch a "humanitarian" war, and ultimately, the ouster of Milosevic, working
through its proxy, the Democratic Opposition of Serbia.

The atrocities of August 1995 are now largely forgotten in the West,
and while they seem to be old news, they do shed light of recurrent patterns
that can be glimpsed today. The West's penchant for precipitating crises
that can be used as pretexts for intervention in countries that seek to
pursue an independent course hasn't abated. And it's all too common for
victims of Western-backed aggressions to be portrayed as the aggressors
themselves. North Korea, for example, is now widely understood to be a
hostile nation, even though it is the US that shows every indication of
being hell-bent on resuming a war with the impoverished country it has
never entirely renounced. Cuba, Belarus, Zimbabwe, part of a complement
of nations George W. Bush has designated "captive nations," along with
North Korea ("Bush blacklists Zimbabwe, Cuba," news24.com, July 19, 2003)
are portrayed as brutal, repressive, regimes, though the reason they're
demonized has everything to do with their inhospitable orientation to the
global capitalist economy dominated by the United States.

That too was the Serb's offense, in the eyes of the West, which is why
there ever was an Operation Storm, why there's a Star Chamber at the Hague,
and why MPRI won't soon be facing war crimes charges.

...

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